Mark Bittman

He is one of the country’s best-known and widely admired food writers, beloved for his candor, non-chef attitude, straightforward writing style and simple recipes. He created “The Minimalist,” the popular New York Times weekly column (now in its 11th year), accompanying Web videos and daily blog, “Bitten,” also hosted by the Times.

Bittman’s best-selling How to Cook Everything has become the bible of basic cooking for millions of Americans; his most recent book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (recent winner of an IACP/Julia Child award and nominee for a James Beard award) was one of the best-selling cookbooks of 2007 and is on track to change the way America cooks. Bittman will push his sane eating agenda further with the release of his groundbreaking work on food, diet, and climate change, called Food Matters (Simon and Schuster, January 2009).

How to Cook Everything won the Julia Child general cookbook award, the James Beard general cookbook award, and three other major international cookbook awards; it also spent a record 130 weeks on the L.A. Times Cookbook Hot List. In the late 90s, Bittman created a best-selling collaboration with the internationally celebrated chef, Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Their classic, Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef, is widely considered among the most accessible chef’s cookbooks ever published. Bittman’s first book, Fish—The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, currently in its eighth printing, is the best-selling book on the subject. His other works include the blockbuster The Best Recipes in the World and the award-winning “Minimalist” cookbooks, now collected in Mark Bittman’s Simple and Easy Recipes from the New York Times.